Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun

Published to accompany the inaugural exhibition at David Zwirner’s space in Hong Kong, Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun features new scholarship by British art critic, curator, and cultural historian Michael Bracewell. It marks the first in a series by David Zwirner Books of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work.

Michaël Borremans’s new paintings depict toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. The children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work.

“The scenes depicted by the majority of paintings comprising Fire from the Sun show a state of being or society in which the primal is uncontrolled, without bearings, in a state of anarchy,” Bracewell writes. “ historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.”

Published by David Zwirner Books in both English only and English and traditional Chinese editions.